Spicy Zanzibar: Baby, it’s hot here!

With hiking poles and reef shoes, we splosh knee-deep in water along the reef to the surf break, careful to avoid spiny sea urchins.

We could be sipping ginger mojitos under shady palms on a blindingly white Zanzibar beach. But it’s low tide, and the Indian Ocean waves have rolled back almost a mile.

Now is the time for “reef walking.”

Occasionally, we stop to pick up shells and examine sea cucumbers. We even spot a small octopus.

Zanzibar beaches are beautiful

We’re reef walking off Bwejuu Beach. On Zanzibar’s east coast, Bwejuu Beachis rated one of the world’s 30 most beautiful island beaches by Conde Nast Traveler. But it’s also one of the most unusual. (It’s unusual too for Zanzibar beaches. The water doesn’t roll back as much at low tide on other Zanzibar beaches.)

Along with reef walking, we watch local village women harvest seaweed offshore.

Women farm seaweed on some Zanzibar beaches – photo Matthias Zirngibl

The coral sand beach is firm, so you can take out hotel bikes and ride for miles along the hard-packed coral sand.

And when the wind picks up, windsurfers and kite boarders fly through the white caps.

Kite surfing on Bwejuu Beach – photo Baraza Resort & Spa

Bush-and-beach holidays

Part of Tanzania, Zanzibar is an archipelago of over 50 islands; the largest is commonly known as “Zanzibar.”

Most visitors come to Zanzibar for the beaches.

New charter and other flights make it fairly easy for Europeans to jet into Zanzibar just for a beach holiday. North Americans usually add Zanzibar at the end of an African safari – a bush-and-beach vacation. (We’ve tacked on Zanzibar after our canoeing-with-crocodiles safari in Zambia.)

Bwejuu Beach is one of the world’s 30 most beautiful island beaches

Zanzibar spice tours

Spice tours are popular if you’re willing to vacate your beach chair and explore some of the island.

Zanzibar is known as the “spice island.”

Its lush interior is full of spice farms growing cardamom, cinnamon, vanilla beans and other spices (but only cloves are exported).

On our tour, our lithe teenage guide scampers up tree trunks to pull down various fruits and seeds. Breaking open a furry “lipstick fruit,”he makes us laugh when he smears the inside red paste on his face and blows kisses with freshly painted crimson lips.

Our young spice tour guide shows us the lipstick fruit

The lipstick fruit

Jozani monkey forest

We also book a half-day tour to Jozani National Park.

The mahogany forest is home to rare red colobus monkeys, only found on Zanzibar.

They’re cute little creatures, with white crowns of hair – especially one particular baby we try to photograph, who swings and jumps about while his (her?) mother tries to sleep sitting upright on a branch.

Mother and baby red colobus monkeys

Splurge-worthy hotels on Zanzibar beaches

Large big box hotels aren’t the norm on Zanzibar. Present-day tourism, beyond backpacker hostels and simple beach cottages, only started to sprout in the past decade. Before that, a bloody African/socialist revolution in the mid-1960s closed Zanzibar to the outside world for more than 20 years.

But Zanzibar is now a hot destination. Honeymooners and international visitors who like a little luxe have discovered the island.

Several new all-inclusive boutique beach resorts have also opened. Like the hip new Baraza Resort & Spa, which resembles a gleaming white sultan’s palace. Welcoming both couples and families to its one- and two-bedroom villas with private plunge pools, it catapaulted onto Conde Nast Traveler’s 2012 “Hot List” of top 60 best new hotels in the world.

Its sister resort, The Palms, is a romantic, adults-only, all-inclusive escape on Bwejuu Beach with six thatched villas, offering exceptional service, gourmet food and your own private tented banda (bunglow) for lounging on the beach.

Rates at Mnemba match the star wattage of its guests: $1,550 (USD) p.p. a night in high season. Maybe it’s some consolation they include twice-daily scuba dives, barefoot butler service and all the fresh lobster you can possibly eat :-).

But to be honest, most of our time on Zanzibar is spent at these resorts – simply sipping ginger mojitos on our beach chairs, watching the dhows sail slowly by and enjoying the Zanzibar beaches…

If you go to Zanzibar

The best time to visit Zanzibar is between mid-June and the end of October (high season), when there’s little rain and temperatures are coolest (around 80 degrees F). December to March is also dry and sunny, but much hotter.

Resorts on Zanzibar beaches are mostly all-inclusive (there are usually are no other eating options around).

Talk to your doctor about anti-malarial precautions, as Zanzibar is in a malaria area.

This post brings back so many great memories from my honeymoon in Zanzibar – we had such a great time on the spice tour and loved the unspoilt beautiful white sand beaches – most of all, we loved how warm the people in Tanzania and Zanzibar are!

I haven’t been to Zanzibar but my daughter has. She had some time to kill with all the Kenyan unrest a few years ago – while on a bike ride from Cairo to Cape Town – so decided to climb Kili and then do Zanzibar. She loved it but she flew over in a dust storm and ever since has been afraid of plane crashes. I guess it was one ugly flight but the island sounded and still sounds amazing. So do the prices for the fancy places.

Sounds like quite the adventure your daughter had! (inherited the bug from her mom :-) As for Zanzibar, we understand the tourism focus is the luxury market – deluxe boutique resorts are seen as the way to help the island’s economic growth.

We too loved Zanzibar. Stone Town has so much character and is very photogenic. The food there is great too. We then went to Paje Beach and loved it there! The women were harvesting seaweed on that beach as well. We had a great bamboo thatched bungalow and enjoyed a week’s stay.

Reading and looking at the photos of Zanzibar makes me want to go there especially today where the temperature outside is about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Zanzibar is added to my list now. Love the pics! :)

Hmm. I just booked a bed and breakfast (en suite with a pool) in SIem Reap, Cambodia for $39 per night—for two people, so I’m still hyperventilating from the $1,150 price tag — per person, per night for these Zanzibar resorts. However, I must admit, that beach looks near perfect for beach walking, one of my preferred activities.

It was interesting! (though hot, but everywhere is hot :-) And how can you go to the “spice island” and not learn about all the spices they grow? The funny thing, though, is that even though it’s the “spice island,” Zanzibar only exports cloves – the rest of the spices grown are for use just by the locals and to sell to tourists who visit the farms.